


ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED

by Boardingschooled



Series: and you're standing here beside me (i love the passage of time) [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Art Museums as Theraputic Spaces, Character: Ten, Character: Twelve, Gen, Museum of Contemporary Art
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 01:12:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19262962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boardingschooled/pseuds/Boardingschooled
Summary: By your response to danger it is easy to tell how you have lived and what has been done to you. You show whether you want to stay alive, whether you think you deserve to, and whether you believe it's any good to act.Jenny Holzer,TruismsIn which Kali uses contemporary art as a coping mechanism and gets a nasty shock.





	ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all! This fic is intended as a brief interlude between two larger works in a series. If you haven't read _stand (in the place where you live)_ , this won't make a ton of sense, so fair warning.
> 
> Additionally, I've added hyperlinks for each of the pieces Kali mentions from the MCA where they are first named in this work. If you would like me to add image descriptors, I'm more than happy to do so, just let me know!
> 
> In the endnotes, you can find a whole bunch of my editorialization about art! (Specifically, my editorializations about Jenny Holzer, really.)

Sometimes Kali finds herself at the MCA. It’s not like she loses time, exactly, more that she puts her brain on autopilot and finds herself in front of [Claire Zeisler’s _Fragments and Dashes_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1980/Claire-Zeisler-Fragments-And-Dashes-1978-1980) or one of Arnold Gilbert's [haunting black-and White prints](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1977/Arnold-Gilbert-Untitled-1977). It mostly happens when she stops feeling like a real person, when Axel and Ten and Anne are all mostly okay and Kali feels like being a normal teenager (whatever _that's_ supposed to mean, Patti) is some shitty fucking pipe dream. Usually she comes after therapy, flayed open by her feelings and in search of comfort.

Ten might have days where a tv ad makes her lock herself in the bathroom for an hour or two, and Anne still can't sleep with the fucking light off and yeah, sometimes Axel comes home from work and can't stand to be touched, too tired from holding other people’s pain all day, but at the end of the day, they're all still _people_. Fucked up people, yeah, but they’re all able to function, to exist in their bodies and their roles and _do things_. 

Sometimes Kali _can’t_ , has to just go, to jump on the El at a random station and ride for a while until she feels like she can stand to shove her feral self back inside her skin. She almost always ends up at the Museum of Contemporary Art, somehow. The entry fee is fucking _expensive_ , so usually she uses whatever crumpled up receipt she has in her pocket and her illusion to convince them she has a membership. 

It had happened by accident, the first time; she'd been looking for somewhere safe to just _sit_ for a minute, somewhere Papa wouldn’t look for her and the gang of anarchists she and Axel had collected wouldn't be _up her ass_ trying to find more laboratory shitheads to kill. She'd wandered into the squat little building on a Thursday afternoon; a little blue-haired old lady had tapped her on the shin with her cane, gestured for Kali to follow her.

“Honey, you better come see this stuff,” she’d said, opening her ugly vinyl pocketbook to hand over the money for two tickets. “There’s this gal, Magdalena something, she does stuff with wool you can’t even _imagine_.” The old lady, Margie, had herded Kali through the galleries, pointing out [_Mano Lirio_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1983/Mary-Stoppert-Mano-Lirio-1983) and Forrest Bess’ [_Dedication to Van Gogh_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1946/Forrest-Bess-Dedication-To-Van-Gogh-1946) and some truly baffling [wool-and-rope sculptures](https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/1982/Magdalena-Abakanowicz) by Magdalena Abakanowicz that Margie had lectured about for probably fifteen minutes. When Kali had frozen in front of Albers’ [_Late_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1965/Josef-Albers-Late-1965), overwhelmed by just how much the grey-black squares taking over the paper looked like the Blank Space somehow, Margie’d sat on one of the benches nearby and let Kali look. Kali hadn’t seen Margie again after that day, but she hadn’t stopped coming back, either.

They’ve taken _Late_ out of the rotation now, although Kali has a beat-up poster print of it she keeps as a reminder of all the shit they can’t take from her, all the shit she didn’t ask for but wouldn’t give back even if she could. Kali’s found herself at the MCA more and more often, since they moved in with Patti; trying to be a real girl is _exhausting_ , honestly.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WHAT UNTIL YOU SUPPORT YOURSELF, [_Truisms_](https://mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1983/Jenny-Holzer-Truisms-1983) blinks at her. It’s probably Kali’s favorite piece in the museum; she always makes it a point to look at it twice, once when she’s wandering and once before she leaves. 

She’s heard of bibliomancy; Denver, one of the anarchists, way back when she and Axel had just been getting everybody together, had had a habit of flipping open his bible and pointing to a random verse, letting it make some grand statement about his life. The night before she and Axel had left them, disappearing without a word or a trace so the others wouldn’t be any more at risk, Denver’d read Psalms 41:9, _Even my close friend whom I trusted, he who shared meals with me, has turned against me_. 

Maybe the way she looks at _Truisms_ is bibliomancy, or something close to it; the day after she’d finally told her therapist how it had felt to kill Papa, how she’d felt the rush of victory for about half a second before she felt--well, _nothing_. She’d found herself at the museum after her appointment; _Truisms_ had told her, KILLING IS UNAVOIDABLE BUT NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF, which had felt true then, still did now. Jenny Holzer’s no-nonsense advice has this weird way of making Kali feel _safe_ , like there are parameters to the world. 

There are other pieces Kali loves at the MCA: Marisol’s [_Six Women_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1965/Marisol-Marisol-Escobar-Six-Women-1965-66) that always kind of makes Kali think of the other experiments they haven’t found yet, if any of them are still adrift, alive away from the closest thing they’ve got to kin; [_James Bond Meets Pussy Galore_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1964/Nicholas-Krushenick-James-Bond-Meets-Pussy-Galore-1964), a riot of color she fucking loves mostly because it reminds her of the Dr. Seuss books they let her read every once in a while at the lab, one of the only bright spots in the whole shitty thirteen-odd years she’d spent there; this Kenji Nakahashi print called [_Three Cups_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1980/Kenji-Nakahashi-Three-Cups-1980) that just, like, _soothes her soul_ somehow. _Truisms_ is the only one she takes as gospel, though, the only one she would throw a fit about if they ever tried to take it out of public viewing. 

She’s got a print of one of the signs from [_Living_](https://projects.jennyholzer.com/painted-signs/living--1980-1982/gallery#5), not one of the ones they have at the MCA but one she special-ordered; it screams in big red capital letters BY YOUR RESPONSE TO DANGER IT IS EASY TO TELL HOW YOU HAVE LIVED AND WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO YOU. YOU SHOW WHETHER YOU WANT TO STAY ALIVE, WHETHER YOU THINK YOU DESERVE TO, AND WHETHER YOU BELIEVE IT’S ANY GOOD TO ACT. She has it hanging in her room, directly across from her bed; sometimes it’s enough to help her remember why she didn’t leave the girls with Patti and get the hell out of dodge the second she could.

Patti’s _great,_ really; she’s got them all in therapy (except Axel, who won’t go, which sucks but, like, Kali gets it; therapy is fucking _hard_ , and Axel deals with hard shit all day long at his fancy new job) and they’ve finally gotten into a new apartment so they all have their own fucking rooms, thank god. Patti goes to work every day and does just as hard of a job as Axel and then comes home and dotes on Anne and Ten and, as much as they can stand it, Axel and Kali. She feeds them a balanced diet and talks about how great they are all the fucking time and there’s a fucking _chore wheel_ hanging off the fridge, Anne’s curlicue handwriting and decorative arrows connecting _Kali_ with _take out trash_ and _Axel_ with weekly dinner or whatever the fuck.

It’s like Kali’s living in Bizarro World sometimes, with something that looks like a family if you squint at it just right, siblings to bicker with about who used all the hot water and somebody almost like a parent to check if Kali’s brushing her teeth or eating her vegetables or whatever. It’s nice, honestly, for the younger girls if nothing else.

Axel used to say that Kali didn’t know what to do with kind, wouldn’t know kind if it bit her; sometimes, she feels like that’s the truth. Ten’s stint in--the foster care system, maybe?--had made her _hunger_ for kind, gave her just enough kind to get her hooked and then took her stash. Anne had never known anything other than life in the laboratory when she got dropped into Patti’s life, hasn’t had to learn like Kali has that the world isn’t often kind, that you shouldn’t expect kindness. Axel’s known kindness, too, of a sort; he still calls one of his aunts once a year, and she risks getting shunned by the rest of the family to pass messages between him and his younger siblings.

Sometimes Kali is baffled by the way Ten curls up at Patti’s feet after she washes her hair, wide-toothed comb and coconut oil in hand so Patti can twist her hair into shining knots, or the way Anne shoves into Patti’s personal space when she’s cooking to ask questions about what spices she’s using; the easy, wide smile Patti gets when they want her attention is hard for Kali to look at. She dotes on Axel, too, or at least it seems that way when they all sit at the dinner table and both of them are laughing too hard about something that happened at work to tell the story coherently. 

It’s harder, for Kali; other than Axel and the rest of the anarchists--most of whom were just there to see her do freaky mind shit and have a decent reason to kill somebody--she’s never even _seen_ kind. Axel had picked her up off the streets, taken one look at her and known he couldn’t give her the kindness he wanted to; that was probably the only reason she’d stuck around long enough to let him try to show her kind. So, the point is, Patti keeps _trying_ and Kali’s trying too, she’s pretty sure, but she doesn’t really _like_ to get hugged or taught how to cook or stuff like that and Patti seems like she’s at a loss.

Kali should really be going now, probably; she’s been staring at [_American Colors_](https://www.mcachicago.org/Collection/Items/1976/Alexander-Calder-Flying-Colors-1976) for too long, lost in her thoughts. She much prefers Calder’s mobiles, really, and the whole patriotism thing isn’t really what she’s into, either. Besides, Axel gets all pissy if she doesn’t get home by dark, not because she’s in danger or anything stupid like that but because if she’s gonna be going out and doing rebellious shit, he wants to do it too. 

Patti had tried for about a week to enforce a curfew for the two of them, but after the third time Kali had made Patti think the two of them were asleep on the couch only to be woken up to knocking at two am when they realized their keys didn’t open the deadbolt, she’d thrown up her hands and made them promise not to do anything stupid _alone_ , at the very least. 

They still go to punk shows and get stoned and go flirt with people at gay bars in Boystown, as often as Axel can handle it now that he’s a _working stiff_ or whatever; Kali spends a lot of time in the Chicago Public Library during the day, reading boring books written by old white men so she can get into real school. Her life’s boring now, like somebody shifted her into neutral. Papa’s dead, but she can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else, _someone else_ , and she’s afraid she’s getting soft, now, too soft to do what’s necessary if anything should happen.

She brings home stacks and stacks of stuff for the girls to read from the library, too, hauling a backpack and two or three tote bags home a week and ignoring the other El commuter's dirty looks. Anne’s been rereading the _Anne of Green Gables_ series basically non-stop since a box had come smelling somehow like Love’s Baby Soft even after its trip through the postal service, Nancy’s handwriting on the label and the note she’d slipped into the first volume, but Austen will read anything with words on it (including the back of the cereal box, the little weirdo). The Chicago Public Library has a killer selection of novels Kali and Ten can argue about while everybody else talks around them.

OFFER VERY LITTLE INFORMATION ABOUT YOURSELF, _Truisms_ reminds her as she takes her final pass, and it feels more like a warning than usual. She’s still thinking about Jenny Holzer’s truth as she walks out of the museum, waves goodbye to the security guard.

Kali pulls her little sketchbook out of her backpack while she’s waiting for the train, scrawls down the quote before she misremembers it; it seems important, more so than usual. She’s half-focused on the train when it pulls up, trying to sketch the bones of, well, _something_. She’s zipping the sketchbook and pencil back into the front pouch of her backpack and trying to hold on to one of the pull straps for stability when some woman comes running up like she’s trying to beat the closing doors. She stops dead when Kali looks at her, and as the door closes on her face, she yells. 

“Eight,” she screeches, and Kali’s stomach _drops_. She says something else, too, but the doors are closed, so Kali just watches her mouth something unintelligible. The train shoots off, the woman still stuck on the platform; Kali’s almost glad for the paranoia that’s kept her on edge since she was thirteen and convinced some idiot to let her take his car from the lab out in Pittsburgh.

She takes four trains to get home, which Patti and Axel are both gonna be mad about at first; she’s _absolutely_ missed dinner, but she doesn’t want anybody finding the new apartment, so. When she does get to the house, there’s twin outrage (just as expected) from the mother hens, both of them grumping at her about missing dinner. Ten’s sprawled across the armchair in the corner, head tipped upside down as she reads _The Hobbit_. 

“Hi, sorry about dinner, I was at the museum and there was--” Kali remembers that she probably shouldn’t freak out the girls about half a second before she says something stupid; she forgets, sometimes, that Austen’s basically been on the run since she was, like, _twelve_ and hearing that somebody recognized Kali would freak her the fuck out. “And, uh, I lost track of time, there was a delay on the El too, some asshole threw something on the tracks.”

Axel can tell she’s not telling the truth, and from the look on Patti’s face, she can too. That’s fine; Austen hasn’t even looked up from her unnecessarily dense novel and Anne must be in the room she and Ten share, so nobody’s freaking out thus far. Everything’s fine, she tries to convince herself.

“Lemme heat you up the leftovers,” Axel offers, a little too casual, and Ten _does_ look up at that, glances between the two of them, as if either of them have _ever_ had bad enough poker faces for her to tell if something is wrong just by looking. 

“No, you dorkus,” Kali goads him a little, the way they usually are. He forgets that the girls are so perceptive; his childhood had been okay enough--well, until he’d come out--that he’d never had to read a room at a glance or interpret the adults’ silent conversations to avoid _punishment_. He isn’t always looking for danger in the people he cares about, which is probably good, really. If Patti were the only one with any faith in humanity in the house, she’d probably go insane.

“Whatever, idiot, tell me what new shit you saw at the MCA today,” Axel brushes her off, heads into the kitchen. “Ten, you want some tea or something?" “Yeah, sure,” Ten says distractedly, flipping her page, and Kali feels okay talking about it in the kitchen; neither of the girls are as hypervigilant as they were the first little while they found Patti, and they don’t have the bad habit of listening at doorways and through walls like she does. 

“Okay,” Axel murmurs as she comes into the kitchen, “Why the _hell_ were you so late?” He sets the kettle on to boil, and the crackly noises of water on the stove coil covers their conversation well enough that Kali feels okay explaining.

“So I _was_ only gonna be a little bit late, but when I got on the El this lady came running up the platform, and she, uh, she knew me--knew my number. I didn’t recognize her, but it was fucking scary, and even though she didn’t make the train with me, I was worried she would try to follow me or something so I took some decoy trains. I didn’t want her to find the apartment, you know?” It feels easier, now that Axel knows, even if the way he pales is kind of worrying.

“ _Shit_ , Kali. It’s not like if it were Ten or El or something, that would be, like, scary, but nobody’s called you Eight since--” Axel’s got this look on his face like he feels sick, and he pulls down two mugs, passes her a plate of pasta with peas and bell peppers and chunks of chicken, warm from the microwave.

“And I don’t look anything like I did then, either,” Kali says, and the worry settles back into the pit of her stomach. She’s grown her hair out long, wears enough eye makeup that sometimes women clutch their kids tight to them when they pass her in the street, projects an air of _don’t fuck with me_ that she _definitely_ hadn’t had before she’d escaped; she’s changed _so many things_ to keep herself indistinguishable, and she’s _still_ failed, they can still find her.

Fuck.

“Constant Comment with two sugars, right Aus? Patti, you want tea?” Axel calls, plopping a peppermint teabag into one mug for himself and a Constant Comment one in the other for Austen.

“Yeah, baby, I’ll come make it myself,” Patti says, and pads into the kitchen. 

“Three, please,” Ten says, after the usual awkward pause that happens when she’s trying to finish a paragraph and hold a conversation at the same time. 

Patti’s eagle-eyed enough to see the worry on both their faces, and she comes over, holds an arm out for Kali to curl into. Usually, Kali wouldn’t, uncomfortable with affection from anyone but Axel and sometimes the girls, but she needs it right now, honestly. 

“What’s happening, honey?” she asks, taking down two more tea cups. “Let’s all have some tea, huh?”

Kali explains again, gnawing on her bottom lip. She’s been trying to break the habit, really, but if there’s ever a time she needs the comfort, it’s now. Patti tuts soothingly, rubs at Kali’s arm gently.

“Well, honey, I’m sorry, that’s _terrifying_ ,” she says, in that way she has of acknowledging the shitty things without making you feel too bad about them. “We’ll have to call Hopper and them later, let them know to be on the lookout. It’s a good thing you told me, and an even better thing that you and the girls are leaving for Hawkins so soon.” 

They’re all three going down for the summer; Axel’s _mega bummed_ he can’t go, but _somebody_ has to stay to make sure Patti’s okay, and he’s got a big kid job now, so he can’t just _leave_ for three months, and really the three of them are going to be doing what’s basically summer school with Nancy and Billy most of the time, anyways. They’re still not where they need to be to start school, but hopefully they won’t be far off by August.

“I thought I had changed enough that they wouldn’t find me,” Kali says, suddenly on the edge of tears. She can’t keep herself from crying, which would be embarrassing if Patti weren’t folding her into a proper hug, rubbing circles into her back, rocking back and forth just a little.

“Well, baby, we can change _some_ things,” Patti offers, still gentling Kali like she’s some wild animal--not too far off from the truth, really. “I don’t think I could get your hair too much lighter without ruining it, but I bet we could perm it, trim it some, get you some clothes with a little _color_ in ‘em so you blend in with all the other teenyboppers in Chicago.”

The kettle whistles, and Axel reaches over to turn off the burner, pours hot water into the cups.

“God,” Axel laughs a little. “I can just imagine _Kali, goddess of death_ wearing neon pink overalls and a high ponytail, glaring at every motherfucker on the subway.” He cracks up, and Kali feels herself laughing a little too. 

“Yeah, I guess we can try that,” Kali says once she’s a little calmer, less tremulous. “The perm, I mean, and maybe some new t-shirts.”

“Axel, honey,” Patti glances at her watch, “I think the beauty store around the corner’s open til nine, will you go get a couple boxes of perm stuff? Ask Ashley to help you if she’s working, or say you know me if she ain’t.” 

Axel glances down at his tea, faux-dismayed, and nods. 

“Be right back, y’all,” he says, slamming the door behind him.

“Is my tea ready?” Austen asks from the living room, oblivious to the seismic shift that's happening in the kitchen. Patti takes her cup and Austen’s and looks pointedly between Kali and her plate. 

“You eat all that, honey, perms aren’t fun. You’ll need the energy.” 

Kali worries, for just a second, about exactly what she’s just agreed to, but remembers another of Jenny Holzer’s _Truisms_ : IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER. Maybe this, letting Patti and Axel take some of the worry from her, help her make it less real for a second, is how Kali will be very tender, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!!
> 
> So basically what happened to make this story exist is that I was looking for date ideas for the epilogue of _stand_ and stumbled across the Museum of Contemporary Art's website and got sucked into an art hole for, I'm not kidding, _six hours_. Once I had done a stupid amount of research about what pieces the museum acquired before or during 1985-6, I realized that, in all honesty, neither my Steve nor my Billy are big art museum guys, and then had kind of a flashback to the innumerable times I've been in an art museum and seen something that's just, like, _struck me_. Art can be a super therapeutic thing, and I think for someone like Kali who's in a weird place of feeling (at least as I conceptualize her) a little feral now that she's grounded in a world that's way less dangerous and traumatizing than the one she's lived in for, well, _her whole life_ , visual representations of feelings and concepts and shit would be incredibly important. 
> 
> All the art I included in this piece was a part of the museum's collection in 1985-6, but there are _so many_ INCREDIBLE pieces of art that were added after 1985; PLEASE go click around on their website and see all the dope shit they have in their collection!!
> 
> Jenny Holzer's Truisms were written in the late seventies and early eighties, and as such can be, uh, kind of outdated in terms of social acceptability. (For example, [this website](https://mfx.dasburo.com/art/truisms.html) has a bunch (though not all) of her truisms, including "Illness is a state of mind," which is a pretty shitty and ableist concept!) One of the cool fucking things about her, though, is that once she started realizing that some of her written works are problematic, she shifted to using (with permission, of course!!!) works by marginalized, groups, including a ton of women of color.
> 
> She's still an active artist, although she focuses way more on projection work nowadays. [Here's an example](http://www.jennyholzer.com/Projections/credit/NewYork2005/) of some of her more recent work, which includes work from a ton of poets and writers. I am _obsessed_ with a ton of the work she's done tbh. (Alexa, cue "You're my inspiration")


End file.
